I'm Dr. Eric Anderson, I'm director of
interventional pulmonology at medstar georgetown university hospital
i see a variety of patients from patients who need counseling on smoking
cessation patients who are at risk for developing lung cancer those who have
smoked cigarettes for a long period of time and i also spent a lot of my time
doing diagnosis and staging of patients who have been found to have lung cancer
or an abnormal ct scan of the chest that may demonstrate a lung nodule or
enlarged lymph nodes in the middle of the chest
i decided to go into pulmonary critical care medicine because of the multiple
types of activities we can do each day the multiple types of patients we can
take care of whether it's the critically ill in the icu or the outpatient
patients who have continuity for a long period of time
helping them make it through their problems
there hasn't been any great movement in the survival of these patients for a
very long time and now we're finally on the cutting
edge of changing things we are now being able to detect patients with lung cancer
screening ct scans at earlier stage disease stages where the survival is
much better we also have technology that has moved
great leaps and bounds to help get the diagnosis for our patients
and we have even better technology now for the treatments we have better
radiation techniques and now we have medications that can
help patients with lung cancer survive longer including patients who have stage
four or metastatic disease you want to come to medstar georgetown
university hospital because we have techniques in interventional pulmonology
that will allow us to get you a diagnosis the first time we have a team
of experts who specialize in lung cancer only we have thoracic surgeons who can
use robotic surgery with minimally invasive techniques
we have radiation techniques that only georgetown will have we have proton
therapy and we have cyberknife radiation as options for treatment for lung cancer
and we have dedicated medical oncologists who are here to take care of
your lung cancer with medications whether it be drug therapy like
chemotherapy immunotherapy or molecular targeted
therapies
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patients who come in for lung cancer screening will meet with the nurse
practitioner and have a ct scan ordered the lung cancer screening ct scan is
painless it does not require an iv and it takes
only 15 minutes of time to perform your team will contact you within 24
hours with the result of the scan so there's no long waiting for results
we know that patients who are at high risk of developing lung cancer are heavy
smokers we know that if they do a ct scan on a
yearly basis they can have an improved survival of at least 20 percent or even
more we also know that if you have a ct scan
done once a year if we find a ct
detected lung nodule on subsequent years you may be the person that we find in an
early stage cancer with an 85 survival benefit
instead of waiting till it has spread to other organs it becomes symptomatic the
importance of lung cancer screening is that you do a ct scan on a regular basis
and that we look for those small nodules the nodules that don't hurt the nodules
that have not spread to other places that's how we're going to change this
disease is detection of lung cancer when it's at its earliest stage when it has
no symptoms
lung cancer screenings should be done with the idea that you're at high risk
if you're still a smoker we should also be tackling the
cigarettes our team will help you our team will
have a nurse practitioner work with you to help with smoking cessation we
strongly believe that doing the ct scan for lung cancer screening is only part
of the job the other part of the job is getting you assistance with smoking
cessation
lung cancer patients are not always patients who smoke
sometimes there are genetic reasons for having
a risk for having family members who had a secondhand exposure to smoke or
sometimes occupational exposures uranium miners patients who are exposed to radon
inside their basements these are all causes for lung cancer
there are cases where lung cancer is hereditary we know now that there are
patients who have genetic mutations that cause their lung cancer
some of these patients should be screened as well even patients who might
not be a smoker if your family member has died of lung cancer you may be at
risk for developing the disease yourself the average age for a lung cancer
patient is 74. we know this is not usually a diagnosis
made at early age but at age 50 or higher
patients become more at risk
if you were found to have a lung nodule on your screening ct scan then the next
step may very well be a biopsy a biopsy done with the ion robot bronchoscopy
and using the endobronchial ultrasound to stage the lymph nodes in the middle
of the chest to make sure that they are not involved
the average age for a patient presenting with lung cancer is age 74.
so we have patients as young as 30s but we have many patients who are over age
80 who are coming with a new diagnosis of lung cancer
there are multiple options for patients at both ends of the spectrum
it all depends on the stage and now it also depends on the molecular
abnormalities the genetic makeup of the cancer cell
there may be drug treatments there are options for you
there may be radiation options for you including cyberknife for patients
who are over age 80 who decide they don't want to have surgery as an option
we have two multi-disciplinary specialty clinics for patients with lung cancer
each wednesday afternoon we have a multi-disciplinary thoracic oncology
clinic where you can meet with the thoracic surgeon the radiation expert in
lung cancer and the medical oncologist who specializes in lung cancer
treatments along with the interventional pulmonologists like myself
at one meeting at that same table you will meet
and discuss your case with each of the different physicians so that we can come
up with a comprehensive plan at one time with one setting to help you get the
best care possible we also have a cyberknife and proton
lung clinic meeting with patients each thursday morning
in that clinic the radiation oncologist who specializes in cyberknife and proton
lung treatments meets with the interventional
pulmonologist to discuss possible cases with patients who are interested in
cyberknife for lung cancer or proton therapy for lung cancer patients
the multi-disciplinary clinic allows us to sit around at one table with the
patient and discuss their treatment together
lung cancer is a disease that needs a multi-modality approach to treatment
and the only way that can happen is if you put all the doctors in one room to
take care of you
if you've ever sat on the other side of the table
where the patient is trying to find out what does this diagnosis of lung cancer
mean the best solution to that is to be able
to meet with all the experts at once to have them tell you each of the part
of the treatments that they're going to handle
and how the side effects are going to be all at one time
patients do this through other different hospitals in the region and they'll go
to four different appointments to meet four different people and find out that
they need to start back with the first person because they have a question for
the first one before they can start the next treatment
our team will sit with you at one table come up with a plan and have it
completely formulated right there for you at one visit
having a multi-disciplinary group work with you at a single visit
allows us to get your treatment started as soon as possible and get all the
questions answered all at once
each case is different we sometimes have patients come back to multi-disciplinary
thoracic oncology clinic because their case is complicated and it needs the
input of all the different specialties sometimes we just need one person to
manage them afterwards perhaps they just need the surgeon to go first and the
surgeon will take care of them perhaps they have disease that has spread to
other organs and they need to follow up with the medical oncologist only
we have this multidisciplinary thoracic oncology clinic available for newly
diagnosed patients especially patients who have advanced stage stage two three
or four who have the needs of all the different disciplines to help with their
treatment
i think across the healthcare system we're seeing patients who have presented
to us at a more advanced stage of problem
whether it be a lung cancer problem or another cancer problem it's
being seen across the system if people have not been taking care of themselves
for the past year we need to make sure they follow up with
their health care needs they should be getting their screening done they should
be getting their colonoscopies they should be getting their lung cancer
screening ct scans if appropriate they should be getting their mammography we
need to pick up these problems when they're earliest when they're treatable
when they're curable we can't wait until it's advanced stage
and spread to somewhere else and become symptomatic we encourage all of our
patients to continue to seek their regular health care despite any pandemic
you